

Hughes would pay the university for the upkeep of the lab and provide the researcher with funding so that they could pursue higher-risk projects. The researcher wouldn't have to go anywhere, and HHMI simply paid to support a pre-existing infrastructure.


For years, HHMI pursued a model where it funded researchers who were already at universities or other institutions. The team behind that facility used a gift of stock from the late Howard Hughes to become a leading funder of biomedical research. The HHMI in Virginia is an example of an even more audacious attempt to start something new. While there was no guarantee that Broad researchers would get some of that money, the strong backing of Harvard and MIT made the odds favorable. Government support played a role here as well: the National Institute of Health had made genome sequencing a research priority, and the NIH has the largest non-military research budget in the world. Starting the institution involved bringing together faculty from these two schools and finding benefactors in the form of Eli and Edythe Broad, who donated hundreds of millions of dollars to support the effort. The Boston area as a whole used to lack a facility for the sorts of massive, high-throughput work that the Broad now excels at. While a number of faculty at Harvard and MIT were doing genomics work, this mostly involved individual labs and small teams. Massachusetts' Broad Institute, one of the leading US centers for genome sequencing and research, didn't exist prior to this century. It was CEO Jeffrey Immelt who first suggested opening a research center there.īut not every research center is a clear outgrowth of a structure that already exists. On top of this pedigree, GE also had a key bit of institutional support for its Brazil efforts. GE has a long history of research at Niskayuna, New York that stretches back over a century, and the company had previously taken its research efforts international in places like Shanghai, Bangalore, and Munich. To an extent, this is the situation Herd and his team faced when GE started considering Brazil as its next destination. In these cases, there's already strong institutional support for research, and the organization is largely transplanting an existing research model to a new location. For example, in response to a state bioscience initiative, organizations like the Mayo Clinic, Scripps Research Institute, and the Max Planck Institute opened research centers in Florida. These days, many research centers are outgrowths of something that already exists. And on top of that, would-be lab builders better start out with a lot of institutional support. Ken Herd, who helped set up GE's new research center in Rio de Janeiro, said the building alone carried a $150 million bill.īut a steep pricetag is merely the start. While securing funds is a massive initial barrier for any new facility, a modern world-class lab also needs the right combination of appeal for researchers, planning, and flexibility for when said planning doesn't work out. What does it cost to build a research center from scratch these days? Gerry Rubin, who runs the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Janelia Research Campus in Virginia, estimated that his organization will spend a few billion dollars before it's clear if HHMI's research will work out.
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Toss your manual overboard-augmented reality aims at big industry.Navigating a city while speaking spanglish-or sportugeuse-to Brazilians.Live chat: talk to us about research in Brazil (or just research).The final road trip: Ars editors chat about industrial research labs.
